Site Search Navigation

Search NYTimes.com

Loading...

See next articles

See previous articles

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Supported by

The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy

June 4, 2015 12:31 pmJune 4, 2015 12:31 pm

Reflecting both on Caitlyn né Bruce Jenner and the Gallup data that inspired my own sojourn into polygamy, Damon Linker argues that social conservatives (in particular, his friend and mine Rod Dreher) are wrong to portray the rise of social liberalism as a matter of individualism unbound from all moral restraint. Rather, it represents the triumph of one distinctive moral code, the morality of rights, over another, the morality of ends:

Consider that [Gallup] poll … Same-sex relationships, sex between an unmarried man and woman, having a baby outside of marriage, and divorce — many more Americans are morally accepting of these behaviors now than they were in 2001. But note that all of them can plausibly be said to harm no one, as long as the parties involved have consented. (Divorce is tricky when kids are in the picture. Though it’s also the case that many now believe it’s worse for children to grow up in a household with parents who are trapped in an unhappy marriage.)

As we move down the list, we come to actions that haven’t budged at all — perhaps most surprisingly extramarital affairs, which were approved of by a mere 7 percent of respondents in 2001 and a statistically indistinguishable 8 percent today. If we were well on our way to becoming Autonomous Eroticized Individuals, wouldn’t our negative judgments about adultery be receding as well? After all, what’s wrong with cheating on your spouse if that’s where you’re led by eros and individualism?

But of course we’re not becoming Autonomous Eroticized Individuals — or at least not simply. We might like to think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, but we’re also devoted to a strict morality that treats inflicting harm as a bad thing. That very much includes the emotional harm suffered by someone whose spouse has betrayed a promise of marital fidelity.

This is true but not entirely sufficient. Clearly, contemporary liberal individualism is not an ethic of nihilism or pure relativism. (If it were such it would be hard to mobilize so much righteous zeal on its behalf.) It’s a morality of rights, as Linker says, with an important list of harms organized around an ethic of consent, and though many taboos have fallen before its unfolding logic liberalism is still perfectly capable of generating taboos and maintaining prohibitions of its own (as well as finding sinners and crimethinkers to condemn, of course). And the rights/ends distinction he makes does indeed explain not only some the current division between traditionalists and progressives, but also why a few issues, where competing rights are in play, have not shifted to the “left” in quite the way that others have.

At the same time, however, rights-based morality has been around for quite a while, while our contemporary social liberalism is a more recent, post-1960s flowering. It is a very particular and context-bound theory of rights, in other words, with particular definitions of what those rights cover and what counts as harm and victimhood. And in its specific vision of who has rights, how they can be exercised, and which harms violate them, today’s liberalism does tend to push for widening adult autonomy (eroticized and otherwise) in ways that an alternative vision might not.

For example, a moral theory can be rights-based while denying, on grounds of harm, a right to kill or otherwise inflict damage on oneself. As, indeed, our own society’s moral consensus still does, as evidenced by the still-stark (though, as with polygamy, diminishing) disapproval of suicide in the Gallup data. But in today’s controversies social liberalism is pressing for (and public opinion increasingly supports) a widening, physician-assisted exception to this rule, on the grounds that where end-of-life issues are concerned the importance of, yes, autonomy trumps any possible rule against self-harm.

Similarly, there is still a general (though not universal) consensus that people who wish to amputate or otherwise re-forge part of their body are doing something dangerous and harmful, not just expressing their right to self-determination. But in the specific case of gender reassignment surgery, what once might have been seen as a harm, an act akin to mutilation, even within a rights-based moral framework is now accepted or extolled because it represents what the deepest, truest version of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner wants. And that shift, like the shift on suicide, suggests that the defining characteristic of the advancing progressive view is not just a broad frame of rights and harms, but a particular stress on autonomy, the truth of the self, as the test for what constitutes a harm and when a right can legitimately be exercised.

Or to take another example, which Linker waves at but doesn’t really grapple with: The question of public vows and their permanence and meaning. A moral theory could be rights-based while also allowing for genuinely binding personal commitments, which would allow others to make a permanent rights-based or harm-based claim on you. A wife would be said to have a permanent right to her husband’s affections and support, for instance, because he had so vowed upon their wedding day. But while today’s liberal moral consensus does allow for a limited version of such claims, as Linker notes, around the specific question of adultery, that claim is emphatically not permanent or binding: Instead, it is strictly limited (and is still widely accepted, arguably, precisely because it is strictly limited) to sexual liaisons, presumably undertaken secretly (I’d actually be very curious to see a Gallup poll on open marriages), by a spouse who intends to remain within the marriage. If that same spouse wishes to simply leave outright, to be unbound again, to break her vow entirely, then the judgment diminishes and the only really “tricky” issue is the kids (about which more below). If you feel driven to cheat, a moral code that condemns adultery but not divorce implies, it’s better to just leave. The individual’s self-actualization can be constrained by vows and promises, but only provisionally; in the end, autonomy is still the trump.

And then on that issue that Linker calls “tricky,” the issue of children: There too a rights-based moral worldview could explicitly privilege the rights of the child over the self-determination of her parents, treating to act of conceiving a child as a commitment that inherently limits one’s personal liberties thereafter. As, again, our society still does in many ways, especially where financial support and physical safety are concerned. (Which is part of why we remain so conflicted about the issue of abortion, where the physical harm is undeniable even if the victim’s full personhood is in dispute.)

But again, with the advance of social liberalism the balance between the rights of the child and the freedom of the parent has tipped in important ways toward adult autonomy, toward a view that children cannot reasonably make certain claims at the expense of their parents’ self-actualization and personal happiness. (With, of course, the self-justifying corollary that the kids will ultimately be better off if their parents have their own way.) Like the spouse who wants to stay the course in a struggling marriage, the child under our particular form of liberalism has no real claim, rights-based or harm-based or both, to any particular kind of familial situation, any particular form of association with his biological mother and father, any particular living arrangement during infancy or youth, or any particular relationship across the life cycle. (The adult children of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, for instance, would be immediately cast as transphobic if they countered his/her right to transition by claiming an enduring right to his continuing fatherhood and paternity.) Consenting adults need not feel constrained by the possibility of conception when they decide to have sex; if they do conceive a child they need not feel obligated to marry for the child’s sake; if they are married they need not feel obligated to remain together; and so on. Indeed, consenting adults may now explicitly sell their own parental stake and obligation to their biological child (a step radically different in its implications from adoption), and the idea that the child might in such cases might have been deprived of something, might have a right that’s been traduced or a claim of harm to make, is regarded as strange, irrelevant, offensive, antique.

So once again, the common thread across these issues is not simply a broad morality of rights and harms and consent. It’s a particular definition of which rights matter most, which harms are meaningful and which are trumps, and whose consent is required to justify a particular decision. The current definitions advanced by social liberalism do not make individual autonomy the measure of all things; they do not simply instantiate a will to power or self-fulfillment. But they do treat adult autonomy as a morally-elevated good, and rate other possible rights and harm claims considerably lower as a consequence. Linker is right that today’s social liberalism does not simply preach an individualism unbound. But it preaches an individualism in which many bonds and rules and constraints are thinned to filaments, and waiting for the knife.

What's Next

About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.